RE: Kickstart setup for different hardware profiles - Help!

["Coe, Colin C. (Unix Engineer)" <Colin.Coe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Message

1. If you're using the EL4 update 4 then you shouldn't need a driver disk.  Anaconda should load the right NIC driver.

 

2. SATA and SCSI (and probably SAS - I've not used them) report as SCSI devices, sda, sdb, sdc, etc.  Anaconda should get the driver right for these controllers as well.

 

3. I support Sun Ultra40 (Opteron based workstation), HP xw6200, xw9300 and xw9400 workstations with a single ks.cfg.  The differences between the machines are compensated for in my %pre script.  I do almost all my kickstarts from NFS shares.

 

My advice is to read the doco on the redhat site. http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/pdf/rhel-sag-en.pdf  All the info is there.

 

CC

-----Original Message-----
From: kickstart-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:kickstart-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of anthony parackel
Sent: Thursday, 2 November 2006 5:08 AM
To: kickstart-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Kickstart setup for different hardware profiles - Help!

Hi All,

 

Unfortunately, I’m assigned the task of creating a kickstart environment that contains the following machines:

 

Dell 1850

Dell 1950

Dell 2850

Dell 2950

 

Each system will have RHEL 4 loaded on it.  I’m very new to linux(Junior SysAdmin) and I

need to come up with a way to overcome the following obstacles.

 

     1.  I need to be able to install specific NIC drivers that aren’t supported

 

     eg. The 2950 won’t boot off the network because it doesn’t have the Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit ethernet driver(bnx2)

 

      Should I setup an environment that will load the drivers off a CD?  Or is this even possible with PXE? (Not sure how it works)

      My guess is that I’d have to put ‘dd’ on a boot line.  Is this correct?

 

2.    Each machine contains different hard drives(SATA, SCSI and SAS).  What would be the most

 efficient way to load the drivers for these different types of controllers?  I plan on setting up a NFS source where these drivers can be loaded using

 The “—driverdisk” option.  Would this be the best way?

 

3.       Since there are multiple hardware profiles, Is it best to have different ks.cfg files on a CD or a network share?  I’d want to ideally assign static Ips

to each server instead of using DHCP.

 

Honestly, I’m very confused and intimidated by this task.  Can anybody please point down the right path?

 

ANY advice is appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

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